A Forgetful Number by Vasco Popa
(two translations: one by Anne Pennington, one by Charles Simic)
Hide-and-Seek by Vasco Popa
Last News About the Little Box by Vasco Popa
Porphyria's Lover by Robert Browning
When a bolt of lightening falls in love by Laura Kasischke
One World by William Heyen
Treaty by William Heyen
Disequilibrium by William Heyen
Immigrant Picnic by Gregory Djanikian
Maybe by Mary Oliver
Last session in June -- we'll have a break in July and resume Aug. 2 at HPL and Aug. 4 by zoom.
For O Pen, sessions will resume Aug. 11 in person at the Fisher Room which will be open for the group from 11 am to 2 pm each Wednesday.
Nutshell:
Vasko Popa (1922-91, Serbian Poet of Romanian descent: https://mypoeticside.com/poets/vasko-popa-poems#block-bio
The two translations of A Forgetful Number provide perhaps more questions than guidelines to understanding what Popa would have us understand between the lines. The above site includes a poem tribute to Anne Pennington, one of the translators.
The group sensed a story behind what seems to be an abstract character with political overtones... this problem of being alone, yet manipulated... the metaphor of being in the dark -- the not knowing, the chase, perhaps persecution... Having two translations is interesting, underlining the complexity of not knowing the original language. The note from his book in which this poem figures, published in 1968, says this poem "gives a comic version of the big bang theory of creation."
Hide and Seek: yes... a children's game... but with a grim overtone of a MC who is cruel and who perhaps will not allow anyone to win... How do we deal with fear? disappointment? We hide...
we seek... but how do we lose ourselves in the process? It would be hard not to suspect that Popa is referencing life in a repressive regime. Simic in the introduction of his translations of selected poems, makes it clear that surrealism is not something invented solely by the French, but goes hand in hand with Serbian folklore.
Last News about The Little Box: Whether you think of Amahl and the night visitors and the Magi singing "This is my box...I never travel without my box..." or the little box our minds construct to contain the world... what happens as you get confused about which box is which... rather like mirrors where you see a door-- .. and the closer you think you are to opening a door, the less you are... or being in our own bubble, as in this pandemic... or the way narcissistic self-love diminishes us.
Simic considers a poet a miner, a pearl hunter, someone assembling a watch... each poem an act of critical intelligence... a magic box. In the first poem, "Forgetful Numbers" he gives a comic version of the big bang theory -- the universe an accident... stupid error that caused time and space to burst forth... Our cosmologies mirror our desires...
Browning: What fun to travel back in time to 1836 and imagine how Victorians would receive this poem!
Judith highly recommends a reading by Paul Scofield, but we couldn't find the link. Much has been written about this dramatic monologue which offers us a glimpse into different minds and worlds.
The strict form (ababb) flows quite naturally with a free verse fluency replete with enjambments.
Paul mentioned that you can listen to this poem with a gaelic ear, and hear quite a different subtext!
What is shocking? Are we shocked by vampires? violence? "immoral" behavior? Browning in his time aroused outrage in his portrayal in this first person account by a rather unhinged narcissist and examination of "marginal states of mind" as the reader is manipulated to believe his wish is that of Porphyria, which is also a rare blood and liver disease and name of a red rock found in Egypt...
One person was reminded of Edgar Allan Poe, another of A Rose for Emily, short story by Faulkner. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Rose_for_Emily
I had mistakenly attributed the poem to a favorite of poetess Matthea Harvey -- the one in the interview cited was Why is the Color of Snow by Brenda Shaughnessy
https://poets.org/poem/why-color-snow
I confess, I was delighted that everyone enjoyed this poem! and also the Kasischke that followed it!
Rather like Vasko Popa's imbedded boxes, or the forgotten number, a sense of creation myth, the interconnected repeats of the inseminator lightening are not in our control. (We find out later, the lightening indeed has a plan...perhaps indeed, that we will never know.)
Valerie picked up on how the form imitates the feel of falling in love...The sibilance and liquids, enjambments, irregular length of the couplets... and ending on a single line she could easily have broken
into two, but doesn't underlines the "almost done".
The window into the personal enters midway... this sense of a mother being far away from a son...
3 poems by William Heyen from Crazy Horse
I was so glad that everyone immediately caught the power of Heyen's story telling. For sure, a good time
to review before "Independence Day" what the 4th of July means to an Indigenous Native. Although we did not bring up Frederick Douglass' famous speech about the sham of this "holiday" to slaves, the same could be written about those who lived in this land before colonists-- and from whom we could learn
valuable ecological and just practices.
The Lakota have been defenders of water... have known how to work in harmony with nature,
unlike the settlers churning the soil into the dustbowl. As for the lies of treaties... the criminal genocide,
the inhumane treatment of children in "assimilation schools", the find of cradleboards in "abandoned lands"... let this not remain in the dark... this division, subtraction, all those traces... as in the Forgetful number.
Djanikian: misuse of idioms, stereotypical ingredients for a picnic... and poignant nostalgia
also powerful.
Oliver: a-typical Mary Oliver poem... and also a-typical portrait of Jesus Christ. Valerie pointed out the sound of the wind over the water in the overriding sibilance (Sweet, madness, stood, sea, silky, sorry, so, saved... 3rd stanza... captures how we retreat to what is familiar... how we wrap ourselves in indifference...or skepticism...
Maybe, the title, reappears in the 5th stanza... maybe some were moved... but this is not shining halo but a dangerous power, like the wind tearing at sails... rips over a killer sea...
and yet this mysterious Jesus, tender, luminous, demanding...
From Valerie! A thank you for the idea of mirrors. "What you see from two opposing mirrors are several reflections of light and whatever images are between the mirrors. These reflections get smaller and dimmer progressively until they finally fade off. At the end of the seemingly endless reflections, there would be a greenish tunnel that stretches into oblivion.
(Interestingly, while searching for photos, I discovered that some people believe that this effect creates a portal for spirits to enter our world)"
Valerie provided these wonderful images!
